In recent years, we have seen significant growth in artificial intelligence technology and its use in different industries such as automotive, healthcare, e-commerce, gaming, e.t.c. Image recognition, one of the flagship applications of AI, has had wide adoption across industries. It is estimated that the worldwide market for image recognition will grow to $29.98 billion by 2020.

A major factor in the growing demand for image recognition technology has been the increased use of the internet and the move of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to the cloud. With this move, the businesses have benefited from some of the advantages a cloud platform offers such as widespread reach, scalability, flexible billing options, rapid deployment and constant availability. With the move to the cloud, businesses have found it necessary to adopt technology that helps them better navigate the smarter and more connected platform; and image recognition is one of those technologies.

Image recognition (sometimes called computer vision) is the ability of software to analyze an image or video, identifying its content e.g. people, objects, places and text. It is widely used in different industries e.g. in self-driving cars, facial and optical character recognition software, disease diagnosis, e.t.c. For businesses that operate in the cloud, image recognition can offer numerous benefits as outlined below.

Automating Tasks with Image Recognition Software Saves Time

Unlike other resources that you can create or acquire more of, time is a finite resource that most likely, to stay competitive, you can’t afford to waste.

Without a doubt, computers are faster than humans at some particular tasks, and so for those tasks, it makes sense to automate the job using software, leaving your employees free to work on other urgent tasks. Image recognition software can be used to automate such tasks as categorizing and tagging media content, content moderation and editing images (e.g. cropping or background removal).

Use of Image Recognition Software can Help Keep your Team Lean and Thus Save Costs

Use of image recognition software can reduce or eliminate required labour. Without image recognition, you would have to put people on the job to do such tasks as tagging and categorizing your digital assets, moderating user-generated content, individually editing images, e.t.c. In some cases, such a feat might be annoying and frustrating at best, but in other cases, it might be outright impossible to do. Take, for instance, a firm that might be offering Digital Asset Management services. The firm might have several clients, each having millions of digital content that needs to be processed. It would be very difficult, if not impossible to run such a service on manual labour alone. To keep its client’s happy, the business will have to keep its asset processing time to a minimal, which means it would have to keep a lot of people on board to do the work. With time, as its client list increases or as the content each client maintains increases, the business’s labour costs will also be skyrocketing. Running such a business on manual labour alone isn’t sustainable. By automating some tasks with image recognition software, you can maintain a lean and cost-effective team.

Image Recognition can Reduce Human Error

To err is human, to forgive divine so the saying goes; but when you are running a business that depends on the accuracy of its operations, you might not be so lax about errors that might occur.

Human labour is susceptible to making errors. When tasked with entering a large amount of data, it is probable that some data will be recorded incorrectly. Human labour is also prone to tiring. When one has to process thousands of images or videos, they might not be as keen on processing a few thousands. With exhaustion and waning focus, errors might creep in here and there.

Image recognition can help eliminate or at least reduce the inaccuracies of human intervention. This will, in turn, save the business resources that would have been lost due to the errors, whether in the form of revenue, labour or time.

Image Recognition can Help you Innovate According to Market Trends

One advantage of running an online business is that a lot of your customers are also online. In this connected ecosystem, it is easier to monitor the market by observing what people share online. By analyzing visual content that is shared online, you might be able to recognize a trend that you can piggyback on when it comes to product release. With image recognition, you can also gain some insights into your competitors by detecting their online visual presence. You can observe how the market engages with the competitor’s visual content and determine if their reaction to it is positive or not. This can, in turn, inform your product design decisions.

Instead of using tedious questionnaires and discovery processes to find out what users want, you can use data to determine this. You can determine what users gravitate towards online by observing what they share and how they react to different content. An example of this in use is Netflix which uses data to determine what shows to create. This can save you the effort and cost of creating something that won’t be profitable once it hits the market.

Image Recognition can Improve your Marketing Efforts

Other than using image recognition to predict products that will be popular amongst your target market, you can also use it to determine how best to market the products to consumers. Using image recognition, you can mine your target market’s visual content and monitor market trends in real time. In this way, you can gain insights on how visual posts spread online, what type of visuals get the most attention, the type of people engaging most with your content, the individual influencers driving most of the traffic and the best platform to post your content on. This can, in turn, help you launch marketing campaigns that are most likely to succeed. Your marketers don’t have to waste their budget guessing at what will work, they can use data to decide on the way forward.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), counterfeit products may cost the global economy up to $250 billion a year. Businesses running online platforms that allow sellers to sell goods always run the risk of having some sellers selling counterfeit products. This can damage the marketplace’s reputation when consumers get products that are subpar to their genuine counterparts.

In General, Image Recognition Makes for Better Apps

Overall, incorporating image recognition improves the user experience of cloud applications and makes their operation effective and efficient. Using better apps is good for any business’s bottom line as they reduce the overall overhead costs.

In the presence of numerous competition, most companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience. Poor user experience can lead to customer churn, and in an interconnected world, it is very easy for disgruntled customers to spread the word about the terrible service they had at your hands; so it is always in your best interest to employ any technology you can to produce the best possible product for your target market.

Do you use image recognition in your product? If yes, let us know how you use it and how it has improved your business. If you would like to find out more about the Imagga Image Recognition API, please contact us and we’ll get back to you promptly.